Another movie that I noticed was on one of the streaming services and had never seen before was the Elvis Presley western Charro! (exclamation point in the title). Never having seen it before, I decided to watch it so I could do a post on it here.
Elvis plays Jess Wade, who at the start of the movie is going to a small Mexican village because he's learned that his girlfriend Tracey Winters (Ina Balin) is there. He walks into the bar, no pun intended, and finds that instead of Tracey, he's got Billy Hackett, the younger brother of Vince Hackett (Victor French) waiting for him. Victor is the leader of a criminal gang, and Jess happened to be in that gang in the past before quitting his life of crime. (The movie was released after the disintegration of the Production Code, so you can have a darker past for the Jess Wade character and get away with it.) Victor wants Jess back for reasons that are soon to be revealed.
After Hackett disarms Jess in a putative shootout, no shots necessary since the Hackett gang badly outnumbers Jess, they take him more or less hostage and take him up into the mountains, where the gang has its hideout. It's there that Jess learns what the gang has been doing after he left. It seems they stole a Mexican cannon that Emperor Maximilian had used during the French occupation. In theory, that ought to be moderately bad, but this is a special cannon, in that it's been gold-plated. This seems highly inconvenient to me, in that the gold plating would wear off, but in any case that gold plating is worth a lot.
Worse for Jess is that the authorities have a wanted poster out, with the authorities knowing that one of the thieves is about Jess' height and has a very noticeable scar on his neck from the shootout when the cannon was stolen. Now, Jess doesn't have that scar, so he should be in the clear. But obviously Vince Hackett thought of that, having his men hold Jess down and brand Jess so that it will look just like the scar the putative thief is supposed to have. He's able to get a horse and get back to town, but his troubles are not over by any stretch of the imagination.
He's able to befriend the sheriff and the sheriff's daughter, especially once he arrests Vince's little brother, being named a deputy in the process, but the arrest of the kid brother is really going to bring problems as Vince wants his brother back, and has the cannon to use against the town should they not accede to his blackmail demands. And then the town learns about Jess' past, and that he has that scar that makes him look lie the description of the man in the wanted poster....
Charro! is different than most of Elvis' movies in that he does very little singing here, singing just the title song, and certainly not having any of the sort of musical numbers he did in his other movies. That said, he's very competent in what is a relatively serious western. Charro! received bad reviews at the time, but I don't see why. Granted, it's more in tone with the programmer westerns of the 1950s and 1960s instead of the post-Code westerns, but it does what it does well enough. I've always thought from some of Elvis' earlier movies that if Col. Tom Parker hadn't put Elvis in all those cookie-cutter musicals, Elvis could have had a solid career as an actor, if not remembered as a great. Charro! is more evidence of that, and is definitely worth watching.
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